Why Catholics Make Such a Big Deal about Mary

And I want to start with a verse in Genesis of all places, Genesis 3:15. So to give some context to this, Adam and Eve have just rebelled from God and God has cursed them both, but he’s also cursed the serpent who tempted them. And he says to the serpent, “I’ll put enmity strife conflict between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”

Now the first thing to know here is that the serpent, the devil, he’s not omnipotent. He’s not omniscient. We sometimes can forget this and we can imagine that the devil knows the whole story of salvation and that he knew the inner life of God and all of this, and we have no reason to believe that’s true and a lot of reasons to believe that’s not true. That if he had what we call the beatific vision, he could never have rebelled from God in the first place because he’d be totally happy and totally at peace. So he is a created being. He’s smarter than we are. He’s more cunning than we are, but he doesn’t know everything. And I mentioned this at the outset to stress that think about this passage not from our perspective where it’s really good news, but from the devil’s perspective where it’s really bad news.

He’s just been told that he’s going to be at war with someone called the woman and that there’s going to be offspring or seed of the woman and seed of him and that this is somehow going to mean that his head gets crushed. So we’ve got those three features. One we’re told just generally God is going to provide a remedy for the fall, that the devil’s plan has succeeded in the short term. He’s convinced Adam and Eve to rebel from God. He’s brought disrupture and disunity into the original unity of Eden, but that’s not the end of the story. God’s going to fix this somehow that somehow at this point in Genesis 3:15, it’s still mysterious. Two, we know that this remedy is going to somehow involve a woman and her son and that’s where salvation is going to come. And three, it’s going to mean that Satan’s head gets crushed.

Now again, from his perspective, you have to imagine the question he’s asking is, who’s this woman I need to worry about because who’s this woman who’s going to have a child who’s going to destroy me? So who is the woman. Well, we have a clue. Now I’m going to talk about things he doesn’t know yet because we see in Genesis 3:15 this language of the conflict between your seed and her seed. And maybe that doesn’t strike us as unusual. Women have children or offspring, totally normal, right? It’s a bit more unusual though in the Hebrew because the word there is zera, it’s seed or semen. And so you see it used in both of those contexts throughout the Old Testament. And so significantly the seed is almost always measured through the man. I know of one exception in the Old Testament, and that’s in Genesis 16:10, where the angel of the Lord says to Hagar that God’s going to multiply her descendants, her seed, literally.

But there we understand why it says her seed because it is not enough to say the seed of Abraham because the seed of Abraham includes Isaac. In Genesis 21 god says this explicitly, “For through Isaac shall your seed be named,” to Abraham. So if we’re talking about Hagar and her children, not Abraham and Sarah’s children, then you have to measure the seed there through Hagar. So in other words, when you see the seed being measured through the woman, that’s not impossible in the Old Testament, but it should be raising some red flags to say what’s going on, because as we see in Genesis 16, there’s a reason for that. There’s an important covenantal reason why we’re measuring the seed of Ishmael and the seed of Isaac separately, if you will, the seed of Hagar and the seed of Sarah, that it’s not enough to say the seed of Abraham you have to say which woman is it through.

Well here, when we see the seed of the woman, why does it not say the seed of the man? Why does it not say the seed of Adam? And we have a pretty obvious answer to that, which is the virgin birth, that the seed of the woman who will crush the head of Satan is the virgin born Jesus Christ and he’s the seed of the woman. He’s the offspring, true human offspring by nature of a woman, the Virgin Mary. He isn’t that of a man, he’s the adopted son of St. Joseph, but he’s the son of Mary in his human nature, not just by adoption. That’s a really important distinction, but it means that the early Christians were right in saying and people like Saint Irenaeus recognized all of this. They were right in seeing Genesis 3:15 as the proto evangelian, as the first Gospel, as the first clue of the virgin birth and all this.

And now if that’s right, that doesn’t just tell us something important about the seed, Jesus Christ, Virgin born, it also tells us something important about the woman, if it’s the seed of the woman as a reference to the virgin birth, then that the Virgin Mary is the referent. So we have this information, right? The devil does not have this information. And so he’s got to be wondering who’s the woman. Now at the time in Genesis 3, Eve hasn’t yet been named Eve yet. That happens a few verses later. She is still known as woman. And so the obvious sense of Genesis 3:15 would be that the strife between the devil and the woman is the strife between the devil and Eve, and that the seed of the woman just means the children of Eve. The problem with this is that we see her offspring and they’re not great, but that, I mean in Genesis 4, Eve has a child, Cain and then has another child, Abel.

And neither Cain nor Abel crushes the head of the devil. Instead, Cain crushes the head of Abel, or at least he kills him somehow with a rock. So that seems to be okay, first candidate gone, but there are two more candidates that happen in the Book of Judges. Now, if your knowledge of Judges is maybe not what it should be, judges were these kind of political military leaders that God would raise up in particular crisis moments for the people of Israel. And in Judges 4, the people have turned away from God yet again and so God has allowed them to fall under the rule of Jabin, the king of the Canaanites. And Jabin has a commander, a general basically, Sisera. And so they’re oppressing the people Jabin through Sisera. And in Judges 4:4 we’re told that at the time the Judge is a prophetess named Deborah and she speaks with a guy named Barak and they’re organizing the resistance to the Canaanites and she tells him that he’s not going to receive glory in this battle.

Instead, in verse nine, the Lord will sell Sisera up into the hand of a woman. Now on the face you’d think, well, this is probably Deborah herself. She’s this military political leader and she’s a woman. Seems like pretty obviously about her, but it’s not. In verse 17, Sisera flees from the battle and he’s welcomed into the tent of a seemingly neutral party. Heber the Kenite and Heber has a wife named Jael, and this is going to get a little gory. She took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple until it went down into the ground as he was lying fast asleep from weariness. So he died.

So he falls asleep, she takes a tent peg and she drives it into his skull. That’s a gory detail, but you’ve got a woman who is crushing ahead and she’s celebrated in a striking way. Judges 5:24, “Most blessed of women,” that’d be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, “Of tent dwelling women most blessed.” And we’re told explicitly why she’s blessed because she struck Sisera a blow. She crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple. So think about this from the perspective of Genesis 3:15. Here’s this, blessed are you among women, woman who has crushed the head of the enemy. That should be setting off big alarm bells if you’re the devil.

But it turns out Jael’s just a prefigurement of the real fulfillment of the prophecy. So the next woman you might consider is Judith. Judith is another leader who is raised up by God to help liberate Israel this time around the Assyrians, Nebuchadnezzar and Holofernes is his chief general second only to himself. Now, this is an interesting detail and I’ll get into why it’s an interesting detail, but you’ll notice both Sisera and Holofernes weren’t the real leader. They were the general for the real leader. I think that is an important detail. Nevertheless, Holofernes is the evil general. Judith convinces him she’s a neutral party or that she’s surrendering and then she gets him drunk and then she goes to his bed and grabs the sword by it says a short prayer, “Give me strength this day, oh Lord, God of Israel,” she strikes his neck twice with all her might and severs his head from his body and then she takes the head and she gives it to her maid who puts it into her food bag.

It’s pretty grizzly in both cases, but what’s striking here in Judah 13 is the response again. This time it’s a magistrate by the name of hose Isaiah who says, “Oh daughter, you are blessed by the most high God above all women on earth and blessed be the Lord God who created the heavens and the earth who has guided you to strike the head of the leader of our enemies.” So again, you’ve got, “Blessed are you among women, women crushing the head of the enemy.” But in both cases, even though that’s happening, Jael and Judith are crushing the head just of a representative. And you see that on a certain level just in the fact that both of these are just the generals working for the evil kings. But you get it at a deeper level and you realize that as St. Paul says in Ephesians six, “Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities,” meaning the true enemy of Israel.

It’s not Holofernes, it’s not Sisera, and it’s not even the kings that those two men work for, it’s the devil who is standing in opposition. He’s the one we’re actually at enmity with. The rest are just pawns, which leads to of course the proper candidate that the woman here in Genesis 3:15 is Mary. And you see this in a really beautiful way. So in Luke chapter one in the visitation, Mary goes into the hill country and we’ll get into why all that location and timing and everything matters, but in the visitation, she goes into the hill country and Elizabeth greets her. She’s filled with the Holy Spirit and she cries out, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Okay. That is really significant language because one, you’ve got another blessed are you among woman women, blessed are you among women, woman. Hard to say.

There’s three of them in the Bible and the other two crushed the heads of the enemies of Israel. And Mary hasn’t done anything like that yet, but she’s being blessed in conjunction to her offspring. “Blessed is the fruit of your womb. That sounds a lot like Genesis 3:15 where it’s the woman and her seed. It’s the woman and her child. And so this should be setting huge alarm bells off for Satan because Mary hasn’t crushed anybody’s head yet. Something seems like it’s going to happen and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be Mary’s going to go kill Caesar or something. There’s going to be something more significant. This is, as I say, more striking if you know the context of where and when and how this all happens. So hold that thought for a second and tie it into what we know about the Ark of the Covenant and the head crushing nature of the Ark of the Covenant.

So let’s just talk about a few features of the visitation and what this all has to do with the Ark. So in Luke one, if you go back and look at the text, you’ll see four major things. First, Mary arose and went into the hill country to a city of Judah. Second, she’s there for three months. Third, Elizabeth says to her, “Why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” And fourth John the Baptist leaps for joy in his mother’s womb at the sound of her greeting. So keep those four things in mind. Compare that with Second Samuel chapter six. In second Samuel six, we see that David arose and went from the hill country of Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God. Second, he’s unable to move the Ark into Jerusalem as he wants to because he hasn’t approached it properly.

He’s being too irreverent in how he’s trying to move it, so he’s forced to remain in the hill country of Judah for three months. Third, this leads him to ask the question, “How can the Ark of the Lord come to me?” And when finally he succeeds, we find King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, that’s verse 16. So that’s not a coincidence. Luke isn’t just mistakenly reckoning something that sounds an awful lot like Second Samuel six. Luke is presenting Mary’s journey into the hill country of Judah as a sort of recapitulation of what happened in the Old Testament where David moves the Ark from the hill country. So in seeing that we should be recognizing that Mary has the role of the Ark of the New Covenant, that what made the Ark holy in the Old Covenant or in the Old Testament is that this is the place where the glory of God dwelled, it was called the Shekinah Glory.

And here in the new covenant, in the New Testament, Mary is carrying not just the Shekinah Glory but the incarnate body of the Lord. This is bigger than what the Ark had to offer, that the New Covenant Ark is greater than the Old Covenant Ark. Okay, now let’s tie these two pieces together. What does this have to do with crushing heads? I know we want to get into that. Well, how did the Ark end up in the hill country of Judah in the first place? We hear about David trying to move the Ark from the hill country of Judah into the capital, Jerusalem but why was it there? So we’ve been looking at Second Samuel six jump all the way back to First Samuel chapter five, and we find that the Philistines had captured the Ark in battle and they brought the Ark into the house of Dagon.

So the God Dagon, their pagan God, they bring the Ark in seemingly a sort of offering to celebrate the fact they’ve defeated the Israelites in battle. It doesn’t go well though. In First Samuel 5:3, the next morning when they get up, they find that their God, their idol has fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of the Lord. Pretty embarrassing, right? They’re trying to show their God is so great and he can’t even stay upright. He’s fallen down before the Lord, so they have to put him back up again. And then in the next verse in verse four, they come back the next day and he’s fallen face downward on the ground before the Ark of the Lord. And not only that, but this time the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off from the threshold. Only the trunk of Dagon was left of him. And so he’s not just fallen prostrate before the Ark, the Ark has destroyed him. He’s been decapitated, he’s been crushed.

This is much closer in a certain way to what’s going to happen to Satan because here it’s not just an enemy general, it’s a spiritual power that is contrary to God. It’s a rival spiritual authority that God crushes and the people get the message in verse seven, once they saw how things were, they say, “The Ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for his hand is heavy upon us and upon Dagon our God.” And so they gather their leaders together, verse 11 and say, “Send away the Ark of the God of Israel and let it return to its own place that it may not slay us and our people. And so in the next chapter, First Samuel six, we hear about how they call out to the inhabitants Kirjath Jearim which is in the hill country of Judah saying, “The Philistines have returned the Ark of the Lord come down and take it up to you.”

They don’t even want to try to bring it up into the hill country and they’re wise to do so because when David tries to bring it through the hill country, Uzza reaches out and touches it to steady the Ark is being moved on an oxcart and he’s struck dead on the spot. This is why he ends up having to stay there for three months. My point there is that at one at the same time, Luke one shows us two things. One that Mary appears to be the fulfillment of the Ark of the Covenant. She’s acting in the way the Ark of the Covenant Acts and two, Mary appears to be the fulfillment of these, “Blessed are you among women, women,” Jael and Judith that we saw in the Old Testament. And what all of those have in common, Jael, Judith and the Ark is they crush the heads of the enemies of Israel.

Now, some people watching this are going to be hopefully convinced at least up to a point, but they might be struggling with a certain issue, which is to say, who crushes the head of Satan? Is it marry or is it Jesus, because this is often a point of some contention between Catholics and Protestants, and I don’t think it needs to be. Well, I’ll explain why it’s contentious because many of the early Christians speak of Genesis 3:15 and where it says in modern English translations, “He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.” Some of the older versions that we find from early Christians, Saint Jerome famously, but even before him, Saint Augustine say, “She shall bruise your head and you shall bruise her heel,” as if Mary herself is the one crushing the head of Satan. And understandably, there are Protestants who are uneasy with that for two reasons.

One, it looks like Catholics are changing the biblical text, and two, there are people who think that it’s sacrilegious. Well, in fact, I would suggest neither of those things are true. Instead, the Hebrew here is not masculine or feminine, it’s neuter. It’s, “It shall bruise your head and you shall bruise its heel. Now, the word Zara is neuter, and so it’s perfectly reasonable to say that the best reference there is the seed, which is Jesus. “It shall bruise your head and you shall bruise its heel,” is a reference to the seed of the woman and therefore to Jesus. That’s totally fine. And you’ll find even modern Catholic’s Bibles like the one I’ve quoted here have he rather than she there, but I think this is a bit of a dispute without a difference. And by that I don’t mean Mary and Jesus are the same. I mean if you look at the way the Ark gets treated in First Samuel that whether it’s God or the instrument of God, it is a meaningless question in a certain way.

So for instance, in John chapter two, we’re told that Jesus performs his first miracle, but if you read the text carefully, you’ll see that Jesus never touches the water. There are servants who do that. And so they’re these instruments who are involved in the operation of the miracle. Likewise, in John chapter three and four, you have Jesus explaining the need for baptism and then this ministry of baptism begins. And in John four talks about how Jesus baptized more than John the Baptist did, but it wasn’t Jesus himself directly performing the baptisms, rather it was those he had delegated, the apostles. So if you said, well, who baptized Jesus or the apostles, the biblical evidence is both literally back to back in John four at first says, “Jesus baptized,” and then it says it was actually the apostles who did it, but Jesus is doing it through them.

So likewise, if we’re asking who does it God or the Ark, Jesus or Mary, we’re creating an opposition where there shouldn’t be one because Mary, the Ark, the servants of the wedding feast of Cana, the apostles, these are instruments being used by God. So to put the instrument against God is a mistake. It’d be like saying, who painted the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo or paintbrushes? And the answer is going to be well both. It’s not 50% Michelangelo and 50% paintbrushes, all Michelangelo, all paintbrushes. That’s the way instrumentality works. And this is something we forget I think at our peril. So who crushes the head of Satan? Both. Now, I alluded to the fact that I think the answer to this is provided in First Samuel, so let’s just go there. First Samuel chapter five we’re told, and we’ve already seen this language that the people of the Philistines say, “The Ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us for his hand is heavy upon us and upon Dagon our God.”

So they accredit their destruction to what? To the activity of the God of Israel, but then a few verses later, they say, “Send away the Ark of the God of Israel and let it return to its own place that it may not slay us and our people.” Do you see what I’m saying there? So it’s fine for them to say on the one hand, the God of Israel is hurting us on the other hand to say the Ark of the God of Israel is hurting us and to realize that they’re not making two rival claims. They’re not saying there’s two separate spiritual authorities Ark against God. No, that’s not how it works at all. They understood that God was present and in working through his Ark. And so if First Samuel five and six are in fact a good data point for making sense of Mary, then it makes sense to say that the question of whether Mary or Jesus crushes the heard of Satan is a moot question because the answer is going to be yes to both, which is why you have this whole spiritual warfare between the woman and the serpent.

Let’s go to that last here. So there is a spiritual war between the devil and the woman. Now this point should be just bracingly clear for anyone who reads the Bible, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, whatever you are, you should be able to acknowledge the point I’m about to make as being self-evidently true. In Genesis 3:15, God says, “I’ll put enmity,” again, strive or conflict, “Between you and the woman.” It does not say that the war is going to be between the devil and God. It doesn’t say the war is going to be between the devil and Christ. It says in the biblical data, the war is going to be between the devil and the woman that the two spiritual teams, if you will, are team Satan and team Mary.

Now you can say, “Oh, I think the woman refers to Eve or the church, Israel,” or whatever and you still have to say there’s some team woman that is the opposite of the devil. So maybe this means you’re not really into Mary. Maybe you’ve decided you’re really into Eve for some reason because you don’t understand who the woman is of Genesis 3:15. Fine. My point here is just that the biblical evidence clearly shows there’s some woman who is super important in this spiritual fight against the devil, and that part should be beyond dispute. That is Genesis, the very first book of the Bible. Revelation chapter 12, we see the woman enthroned in heaven. It says the moon under her feet, she’s got a crown of 12 stars, she’s adorned with the sun. She’s clearly depicted as a heavenly queen and she gives birth to a child, and this child is destined to rule the nations the rod of iron, which is to say her child is Jesus.

So the mother of Jesus is depicted in Revelation chapter 12, and she’s depicted by the way, a verse after John sees the Ark in heaven. So there’s this connection between the Ark and this woman. So this woman who’s seemingly somehow connected to the temple and to the Ark is also the mother of Jesus. It sounds a lot like we’re talking about Mary here, and then a dragon appears and makes war against the woman. Now, John doesn’t want you to possibly miss this. He tells us explicitly in Revelation 12 that the dragon is the ancient serpent, which is to say, John is telling you explicitly that when you read about the dragon in Revelation 12, you should understand this to be a continuation of the story of the serpent in Genesis three, that the strife, the conflict between the serpent and the woman is the conflict between the dragon and the woman.

The serpent and the dragon are the same, which means if you thought Genesis 3:15 is literally about Eve, John’s telling you you’re wrong. Instead, he says in the very last verse of Revelation 12, that the dragon was angry with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. Now, I covered this a little bit last week in talking about the maternity of Mary, Mary is the new Eve, but it’s worth recognizing that this is really important for spiritual warfare as well, that when we talk about Mary, it’s because the devil cares about Mary. He hates her, profoundly. And that’s not just some waxing poetic renaissance saint who’s just really into Mary and just, “Oh, she’s the best.” No, no, no. This is just straight up biblical evidence that the woman foretold in Genesis three, depicted here in Revelation 12 is at war with the devil.

And the reason he’s angry at the woman in part is because he can’t get to the woman. If you read Revelation 12, she’s supernaturally protected by God. He cannot get to her. We believe Mary’s without sin. This is one of the reasons we believe Mary’s without sin and because he cannot get to her, he goes after us because her offspring are those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. So all that’s to say there’s a cohesive picture when you put these pieces together that there is a woman declared blessed among women throughout scripture who has this special unique role in the story of salvation. And because of this, the devil hates her, wants to tear her down, wants to destroy her. And we can actually unpack this a little bit.

One of the reasons, now, this by the way, is a little bit venturing a guess because we can see the biblical data, that the devil is depicted at war with the woman, and it’s reasonable to ask why is he not depicted at war with God? Because obviously in one sense he is, but what’s the reason the devil falls? Well, the best evidence is that it’s through pride and then through envy, he entices Adam and Eve into rebelling from God. He wants to be God, he wants to rule. So rather than kind of entertain those delusions of grandeur, which is what would happen if God directly fought the devil himself, the devil is dispatched quite easily.

We talked about Armageddon, the Battle of Megiddo, and this whole idea that oh, there’s going to be some epic spiritual battle between angels and demons at the end of time, but when you actually read the account, it doesn’t appear to be greatly difficult to wipe out the forces of evil, that the devil is not as strong as smart as he thinks he is.

It’s true, he’s stronger and smarter than we are. We’re pretty low on the spiritual totem pole, but he’s not even close. And so in the destruction of the devil, you see two major figures, St. Michael and this woman, which is to say God seems to make a point of showing he could defeat the devil with his pinky finger. He can take lowly elements of his creation like an angel, like a Jewish teenage mom and use them to defeat this puffed up demon. That’s an important spiritual recognition that we should do well to heed, that God chooses the lowly things to topple the mighty things like the devil. And you know who got that really well, the Virgin Mary. That’s the whole point of the magnifico. He’s cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. That’s what’s happening here. This is why I would argue that the teams are team Mary rather than just team Jesus.

He’s showing us that he uses the lowly. If Jesus the Almighty God, second person of the holy trinity defeated the devil, there’s nothing remarkable about that if you understand my meaning. And in fact, he might feel really good in the same way I’m going to use a sports analogy, even though I know many of you don’t like sports. If a team loses to the number one seed, they lose to the national winners, the Super Bowl, the World Series, whatever it is, if they lose to a great team, they can comfort themselves and saying like, oh, sure, we lost, but we lost to a great team. But if they lose to a seemingly lowly team, that’s humiliating. When the devil makes war against God, God doesn’t turn around and say, “All right, let’s have a one seed verse 16 seed. We’ll see who wins.” No, he says, “I’m going to take low layer elements of my creation and defeat you with that.”

That’s a humiliating victory. That’s a victory that should embarrass the devil because for him, it’s a humiliating defeat and I think that’s the point of it. It’s the triumph of humility. So in all of this, I would encourage you, if you’re someone who’s maybe never taken this Marian spirituality, seriously, never been comfortable with viewing Mary as an important part of Christianity, or praying to Mary or invoking her as your mother, this is actually biblical, the idea that you have a mother Revelation 12:17 says you do. And so you should go to her because this mother of yours is also the queen of heaven. That’s all right there. That’s all biblical. And as I mentioned in last week’s episode, this is also deeply part of the early belief of the earliest Christians.

So I hope that helps change how we view this thing. This is not just some romantic piety. No, this is a recognition of the radical biblical message from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 12:17 and all throughout that there is a spiritual war and we have to choose which of those two teams we’re on. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.